[Update: If you can’t make it to the show, there is now also a GoFundMe page to help Dukey with his medical expenses. Give copiously!]

“22 Centimeter Brain Tumor” sounds like the title of a song by Hollywood horror-punks Haunted Garage, and who knows? Maybe someday it will be. But for now, it’s the grim reality for lead singer Dukey Flyswatter, who discovered he had the tumor last month, but powered through a slew of Halloween-related Haunted Garage shows anyway, like the unstoppable splatter-punk beast that he is.

Now, as Dukey prepares to get that fucking thing taken out of his skull (he undergoes surgery Dec. 10th), he needs your help. I’m not sure what his insurance situation is, but even when you have coverage, shit like this can get expensive in a hurry. So his friends are throwing a little benefit party for him here in Los Angeles at Cafe NELA on Saturday, Dec. 1st. Our friends Radioactive Chicken Heads will be on the bill, along with Gitane Demone, Fifi and Haunted Garage, because of course Dukey’s playing his own benefit concert. Did we mention he’s unstoppable?

It’s my understanding that tickets for this epic night of punk rock and brain tumor-stomping will be a mere $10, though I’m sure larger donations will be gratefully accepted. For those of you not in L.A., I’m not sure how you can donate — I’ll find out if Dukey has a GoFundMe page or something. [Update: Now he does have one. Big ups to Pat Rowan for creating it.] He’s been a friend of the blog for many years and an L.A. living legend for longer than that. He deserves all the support we can give him as he fights through this.

Is it in poor taste to end this post with Haunted Garage’s “Brain in a Jar”? It is? Good, because bad taste is what the inimitable Mr. Flyswatter is all about. Rock on, Dukey, and see you at Cafe NELA. Weird Nation has got your back.

[Update: Due to circumstances beyond our control, Haunted Garage had to cancel their appearance. The Rhythm Coffin will be rockin’ Weird Band Night in their place. Our apologies to all you Dukey Flyswatter fans out there. We’ll try to book them for the next one.]

So how’s this for sweet? After many months of trying to track down a venue dumb cool enough to host a show for us, we finally hooked up with the good people at the California Institute of Abnormalarts to bring you our very first Weird Band Night. It’s all going down on Friday, July 11th, so if you plan on being anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area that night, get your ass down to the CIA or I will personally hunt you down and make you watch One Direction videos until you’re begging for the sweet release of death.

Our lineup is pretty excellent for our first time out, if I do say so myself. Co-headlining are legendary poultry punks the Radioactive Chicken Heads and monster rockers The Rhythm Coffin. And to open the show, we’ve got the unholy man/machine duo of the Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra, up from San Diego and making their L.A. debut. All this for a mere 10 bones, and possibly a dry cleaning bill if you stand too close to the stage.

For more info or to RSVP, check out our event page on Facebook. Not that you have to RSVP or anything. It’ll be first-come, first-served at the door the night of the show. But RSVP anyway so we can show our parents that some people actually take this blog at least somewhat seriously.

And now, to help you get as pumped as we are, here are some videos from our bands. You know you gotta come out and see this shit.

From about 1985 to 1993, Haunted Garage was one of the most demented acts in the L.A. underground rock scene, famous for their elaborate, prop-heavy stage shows and frenetic, horror-themed punk/metal songs. But after releasing their one and only album, Possession Park, and touring the U.S. and Europe with The Cramps, the band called it quits. Mostly.

Since 1993, frontman Dukey Flyswatter (also famous as a B-movie actor in films like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and Surf Nazis Must Die, sometimes credited under his real name, Michael Sonye) has made several attempts to bring Haunted Garage back to life. The first two reunions produced only a handful of shows, but it’s looking like the latest incarnation of Haunted Garage may stick around for awhile. Formed just a few months ago, the new lineup features lead guitarist Erik Erath (who first joined the band for a reunion show back around 2001), rhythm guitarist (and professional makeup effects artist) Andy Chavez, bassist Sean Fodor and drummer Brian Beaver. With this new supporting cast, Dukey is more excited about Haunted Garage than he’s been in years. “These guys, they believe in the band,” he says. “They like the theatrics.”

Recently, I got to visit the band in their rehearsal space at Francisco Studios, in the industrial L.A. suburb of Vernon. I listened while they tore through a full rehearsal set, then we chatted for about a hour, drinking Jack Daniels and swapping stories. Portions of that interview wound up in an LA Weekly article previewing their gig at the Long Beach Zombie Walk. But I just had to reprint the full interview (with a few minor edits) here on TWBITW, because the story of Dukey Flyswatter and Haunted Garage hasn’t really been told enough.

Weirdest Band: Can you talk about how this version of the band came together?

Dukey: I’ve been trying to put together different versions of Haunted Garage for awhile now. If I lay fallow too long, I go crazy. I have bipolar disorder and I just can’t work a normal job with normal people for too long. I’ve just gotta unleash this pent-up energy.

WB: Were you working a normal job for awhile?

Dukey: Yeah, for a little while. I had a gig with Dinah Cancer and this other girl at a movie company’s daycare center. And then one of the women there—I put her kid into time out. You know, I was weird-looking; I had green hair and everything. So she started this rumor that I was yelling at her kid and yelling at all the other kids. That’s the time that sent me into my second nervous breakdown. I had one breakdown when the band quit and then right afterwards there was the [Northridge] earthquake. And then right after that, my brother blew his brains out. And then right after that, my Mom tried to overdose. So that was just a lot. It was just too much. So yeah, I do better on my own and being creative and staying up late at night—I’ve got insomnia a lot.

We’ve tried to do several versions of [Haunted Garage]. Funnily enough—we used to play this place in San Francisco a lot called the Chatterbox. It was a tiny little place. When the bands came in at night, they would take the pool table and stack the amps on it and put a piece of plywood on top of it—and that’s where the bands would play. And Erik walked in in a stupor one night and we were throwing blood and stuff around. And he was like, “I don’t need to see this crap.” And walked out! [laughs]

And then about 12 years ago, me and Gaby [Godhead, guitarist from the “classic” Haunted Garage lineup], we had a big party at a friend’s house, and we got these guys from O.C. [Orange County, California] to be the rhythm section. They were blown away by the [number of] people that came to the gig. So the next time we saw them, they were dictating to us what they were gonna get paid for each gig. They just decided to hold the band for ransom. So that didn’t fly.

That Gaby got offered a gig with the guys from Bottom 12, and [that] morphed into Virginia City Revival. So I was able to do one more revamp of Haunted Garage for one night only at Safari Sam’s a little over five years ago.

WB: That was with Gaby?

Dukey: That was with Gaby. We were going to keep it semi-regular, and I was booking some gigs, but he wanted to make sure that Virginia City Revival was going to be first and foremost. I could see the writing on the wall: Rehearsals were gonna keep on getting canceled. So that didn’t fly.

Trying to find reliable band members when you don’t have any money to tempt them with is like trying to pull teeth, you know? [laughs] You got money, you can get any hotshot kid to go with you on tour. If you don’t have any money to start something, it’s gotta appeal.

So it was just the right time that I hit Erik—and Erik and I are friends anyway. The rest of the people—it’s kinda like it was the first time with Gaby and those guys. It just fell in my lap. I’ve known Beaver before from this band Insecto. And I met Sean at this club where we were doing this cover band Undead Kennedys with Erik, which was Dead Kennedys covers all in zombie makeup. And then Andy I’ve known for awhile…

Dukey: Yeah, from Mondo Video. Used to go there and see them shooting porno. They had all these weird bands there like Extreme Elvis and The Kids From Widney High, which were all these disabled kids. He saw the Safari Sam show and he really enjoyed it, so when he saw on the Facebook page that I was looking for a guitarist, he jumped on it. Plus this is the first time we’ve ever had an actual makeup man, an effects guy, in the band. The rest of the guys didn’t bother learning how to do that stuff.

Andy: Yeah, I work for a costume company.

Dukey: And his wife does, too. And I can do some. And these guys are starting to learn, too. Erik used to do his own zombie makeup and stuff.

Erik: Yeah, I did it in the Redwood one night with no mirror. It turned out OK.

Dukey: You do what you gotta do. One night, I think it was after we made the Cramps’ dressing room way too bloody in Europe—we were playing in Germany, I forgot where. Stuttgart, maybe. Anyway, we couldn’t use the dressing room. So we had to go up on these catwalks that were way high above the audience. We had to change our clothes up there and have little flashlights and little mirrors. No one even knew we were up there, it was so frickin’ high up. So you do what you gotta do.

WB: You said earlier that you have bipolar disorder. So is it when you get the manic energy that you get an itch for getting this band back together again?

Dukey: Absolutely. Being creative, period. I’ve been doing other things. But some things just don’t pan out, you know? I’ve been commissioned to write about three scripts, but they’re just kinda laying there.

WB: I checked your IMDb page and see you’ve still been acting occasionally.

Dukey: Yeah, I had a small role in a film called Reel Evil not too long ago. Me and Johnny Angel Wendell—he’s a musician and an AM talk show host, one of the few liberal ones—five years ago we were commissioned to write Blood Feast: The Musical. And we did, and the first draft turned out pretty good. But they haven’t gotten anybody to finance it yet.

WB: Were you always into music as well as the film stuff?

Dukey: No, I was always interested in acting. I always liked music. I love rock ‘n’ roll music. Me and my friends—it might’ve even been my birthday party—we’re all sitting around drinking beer, and we were just talking about some of the bad movies we liked, and the songs in them. And we were like, wouldn’t it be great if there was a band that played all those bad songs that we remember from those movies? You know, “The South Is Gonna Rise Again” from Two Thousand Maniacs!, and Strange Pursuits and Hideous Sun Demon and The Blob and stuff like that. And then the bass player called me up and said, “Dude, we’re gonna do the band. And you’re gonna sing.” And I went, “Oh, shit.” I hadn’t done any singing, except being drunk.

So you know, it just kinda took off for awhile. And then we found out that not as many people knew about the songs and they thought we were just making them up. So we started to make them up. And then as the band morphed, it just got more and more aggressive. It started out kinda bluesy, then it went kinda psychedelic. And then straight-on metal and punk.

WB: Do all your stage props live somewhere else?

Dukey: Yeah, they live at my house. They’re just building up now. Andy was able to score some stuff, and I’m asking around. We’re getting stuff sometimes right off the junk pile. I just had our corpse reserviced—you know, patched her up and everything.

WB: Does she have a name?

Dukey: Amber’s [Dukey’s girlfriend] just been calling her my wife. I think I’ve called her Monica. We’re gonna put a Miley Cyrus wig on her or something like that.

Sometimes it was hard to get the guys in the old band to fork over the money for the show. ‘Cause they were musicians first and they were showmen way second. But these guys like every part of it. So they’re willing to put some money forth in the beginning to at least get the show going. People expect some kind of a show, but we’re not up to where we used to be. ‘Cause on the last couple of shows [pre-breakup] we destroyed everything.

But the best thing about these guys is, they wanna do it. Sometimes it was like twisting the other guys’ arms. I had difficulty just getting them out of town, like to San Francisco. [puts on a gruff grouchy voice] “Why do we have to tour?” And then when they found out it was a gay bar in the daytime: [gruff voice] “Goddamn, look at all these queers hangin’ around here. We have to play this place?” They changed their tune later on. They were good guys.

Brian: Are you doing the bass player right now?

Dukey: [laughs] No, none of them…no, actually, I was doing the old drummer.

Brian: The bass player you guys had [King Dinosaur], he looked like Ted Nugent. Was he a total redneck or did he just look that way?

Dukey: You know, we made him that way. He was a total San Diego surfer guy. And we were like, this is not gonna fly. We were like, you gotta grow your hair, put on a leather jacket. I had the conversation for weeks to get a leather jacket. And when he finally got it, he’d never take that thing off.

And Gaby, the first time Gaby came in, he was dressed up like a hippie with a Nehru jacket and a peace sign. “You know, that doesn’t quite work.” And he says, “Oh, OK. I think I know what I’m gonna do.” And he just showed up at this club, the Zombie Zoo, about 15 minutes before we were gonna go on, in like a total Catholic schoolgirl outfit with this weird kabuki makeup. Brilliant. He stayed that way ever since. In his other bands, he’s still dressing that way.

I was lucky to start the band at a time in Los Angeles when the club scene was very vital. There were a lot of bands that were doing stuff like that, like Pigmy Love Circus, Celebrity Skin, Christy McCool. Tons of different bands.

Erik: I mean, just your average rock band was throwing shapes onstage and wearing weird clothes. It was quite a time.

Dukey: That’s true.

WB: Does this version of the band have the blessing of Gaby and those other guys?

Dukey: Well, the other guys and I don’t talk very much. But Gaby wished me luck in an email. There’s some resentments with one or two other members, but that’s the way it goes.

WB: You’re the sole original member—the sole survivor.

Dukey: You know, I hated doing that. That’s another reason I waited so long. I didn’t want to like, cheapen it, you know? Here’s Fear and the only one in it is Lee Ving or here’s this other band and the only one in it is so-and-so. All the bands that only have one member left.

Erik: It was hard to imagine Haunted Garage without Gaby …

Dukey: Yeah, he’s so dynamic. So when he was doing the revivals with me, it was fine, because it was me and Gaby. But after that it was like, I don’t know. I didn’t know whether it would work or not. But I had to just give it a shot, because I needed to do something.

Erik: Yeah, what is the story? The first time I saw that thing, it starts grabbing me.

Sean: It almost knocked me over, dude.

Dukey: We used to have a demon suit for that, for “Welcome to Hell.” But we don’t got no demon suit no more. So my girlfriend is like a borderline furry. She’s got some furry costumes and stuff like that She decided to give me that costume for my birthday one night.

At the La Habra Bowl, they have furry bowling on Saturday afternoon. She wants to go, but she works on Saturday. So we might start one out here.

WB: That can’t be easy to bowl in a full furry costume.

Erik: I was gonna say, they must put the bumpers up or something.

Dukey: You know, I think they just roll it [mimes throwing a ball from between his legs] like that.

WB: So was that Amber in the rabbit costume?

Dukey: No, that was a friend of ours. Nick, from the Radioactive Chicken Heads. But I may put Amber in the flying monkey suit.

WB: As far as the sound of the band goes…I was listening to Possession Park earlier today and it sounds pretty close to what you were just playing. But do they kind of bring their own flavor to it?

Dukey: They can play with it. It’s pretty close in structure as long as they get all the chords right and everything like that.

WB: There were a few things that sounded a little more Sabbath-y…

Sean: Yeah, everything’s down a whole step.

Dukey: And the solos are very whatever they feel like doing.

WB: Are there plans to release any more Haunted Garage material? Old demos or any new stuff?

Dukey: Yeah, two people and Sean, too, want to record for us.

WB: Oh, so it’ll be new recordings?

Dukey: Yeah. Basically doing each other a favor so they can have production credits. So new material will be coming out. And then there are a few more songs of the old band that I want these guys to learn.

Andy: “Little Green Men.” I’ve been seeing it on all the threads.

WB: Had any of you guys done stuff like this in your previous bands, with costumes and all? Or is this pretty new?

Andy: I was more black metal/thrash type stuff.

Brian: I might enjoy being in Haunted Garage because of my prop-rock pedigree.

Erik: Besides being in Haunted Garage 12 years ago, 22 years ago, I walked out on the band in San Francisco. It was just too much for me. I was like, these guys are too fuckin’ crazy, so I actually walked out on the band that I’m in now.

WB (to Dukey): Do you have to do things differently now to take care of your voice and your body?

Dukey: Yeah, I have to do a lot more stretching and back exercises and stuff like that. And I used to be all over the fuckin’ stage and I can’t do that so much anymore. But, this one person I’m seeing for my health says I’m still not too old to reverse some of the aging process. Sixty is the new forty, I guess.

WB: How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?

Dukey: I’m pushing sixty. I’ll be sixty next April. But I only feel it in my joints.

Dukey: You gotta just [make] do with what’s around. There used to be a big prop house in Hollywood and I would go raid their trash cans at night. I got all these papier mâché cow heads one night from the trash there and we stuck ‘em up on this wall and threw the wall into the audience and had people smash them. We found this old antique fat shaker machine on somebody’s lawn and just went and used that for “Torture Dungeon.” Stuff like that.

Brian: People used to think those made you lose weight?

Dukey: Yeah, but they don’t. [laughs] I was doing that shit every night for two months and never lost a single pound. It was really fun when you put it up high—you could sing like the munchkins.

So anyway, I knew a lot of people in the S&M club scene that was just starting to come up at that time. It was just like, what am I gonna do with [all] these things? I don’t know how the idea came into my head, but it was like…OK, mousetraps.

WB: It’s an intense image.

Dukey: It’s not that bad. The rat traps after awhile hurt but the mousetraps are not that bad. I did play pierce my eye bags one night. That was kinda gnarly.

Erik: That’s a very delicate area.

Dukey: It was. I got shiners afterwards. [sounds of disgust from the band]

WB: Did you do that in a show or in the comfort of your own home?

Dukey: In a show. I’ve got it on film.

WB: That’s intense.

Dukey: It was intense.

Erik: More or less intense than a roman candle up your ass?

Dukey: Yeah, that was at a party. [laughs] I’ve still got the scar from that. I just don’t think like other people do. I don’t want to put myself in a certain league, but other artists that I like a lot think different, too, like Doug Stanhope, Sam Kinison, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart…

WB: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Dukey: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. When I was a kid, I saw some puppets do “I Put a Spell on You” and I was fuckin’ blown away. “Mom! Get me this record!”

WB: What’s the craziest live show any of you have been to?

Andy: I think Rammstein, when the guy came out on fire shooting lasers out of his eyes. That was pretty badass.

Sean: I have to think. I’ve seen so many shows so I have to clear the cobwebs. I don’t know, I mean, for me, that wasn’t really my cup of tea. I was more of a musician. I would go see musician bands. Like, everybody was into Kiss and I was into Queen at that time. Fuck Kiss, I hate that band. They suck.

Erik: They do. They’re terrible.

Sean: My very first concert that I ever went to in my entire life was Judas Priest when I was like seventeen years old. I saw them on the Defenders of the Faith tour in 1983. They had this huge stage thing with the monster with the claw that came out. [Rob Halford] comes out on a Harley. They opened with “Love Bites” and it was ridiculously loud. I was probably 15 feet from the stage. They hit that first note and I turned to my buddy and was like, “We are not standing here.” It felt like somebody was squeezing my head. So much sound pressure. It was insane. But they were great.

There’s a band out of Kalamazoo, Michigan called the God Bullies that’s pretty wild. There’s a really famous place in Kalamazoo called Club Soda. The Stooges used to play there back in the day. When I saw the God Bullies there, the bass player came out in a full clown outfit and stood with his back to the audience the whole time. The lead singer, I remember he had on these super-tight patent white leather pants and super-tight patent white leather jacket. No shirt. And he had this huge bulge, like down to his knee. And halfway through the show, he opens up his pants and pulls it out, and it’s a rotten squash. And he took this rotten squash and squashed it all over his body. They were really good musicians, too, but that’s probably the closest thing to this band that I’ve seen.

WB: Brian, what about you?

Brian: Strangely, I didn’t see many performance-type bands before I was in Insecto. But being in bands, I’ve always been kind of obsessed with musical power. Like you know, certain bands just seem to have that laser focus. My favorite band from my youth is Jane’s [Addiction]. They always had that. It was four people just musically focused [who] would punch you in the face every time you saw a show. From a musical standpoint, that’s always my goal, to have that wall of power.

WB: Erik?

Erik: Oddly enough, Judas Priest back when I was a kid in high school, too. I saw them in ’78, on the Hell Bent for Leather tour, with the motorcycle on the stage. And then the next time they came around [was] Screaming for Vengeance. That was the first time I took a full dose of acid, too. My ears were ringing the next day. The twin guitars…

Andy: Yeah. K.K. Downing, Glenn Tipton. You can’t beat those guys.

Erik: As far as what I can actually pull off playing, K.K.’s the guy, you know? Delay, whammy bar, wah pedal and just a lot of spirit.

Okay, so we didn’t dress up as zombies for the 6th annual Long Beach Zombie Walk. Instead of brains, we feasted on bacon-and-gorgonzola sliders from the Me So Hungry food truck. But hey, we were there to document. I didn’t want to get zombie gore all over my camera phone. (Except that I kind of did anyway. More on that in a moment.)

Zombies are great and all, but we were mainly there to see the bands. Radioactive Chicken Heads, Rosemary’s Billygoat, Haunted Garage and Metalachi, all in one lineup? We’d eat our mothers’ brains with a spoon to check that out.

Sadly, we missed Radioactive Chicken Heads, which was extra frustrating because we got there during the last 15 minutes of their set and just couldn’t find the entrance. Event security staff were in full-on zombie mode, too. “How do we get in?” we kept asking, at barricade after barricade. “Ugh,” they’d reply, pointing vaguely back in the direction we’d just come from. Who do we have to eat to get into this thing?

We finally figured it out just in time to have about an hour to kill before the next set, by Rosemary’s Billygoat. We passed the time watching a lame wrestling show, a slightly less lame burlesque act, having more event staff zombie conversations about how to buy beer (“Where do I go to get my ID checked?” “Ugh! Ugggghhhh!!”) and, of course, people zombie watching. Not everybody went full undead for the occasion, but among the ones who did, there were some pretty cool makeups. Here’s our personal favorite, the only one we saw from which people actually recoiled in horror.

Incidentally, I’m glad to see he wore his earplugs. Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you can’t take precautions again tinnitus.

Finally. Rosemary’s Billygoat took the stage, and they did not disappoint. Frontman Mike Odd is a serious showman, entering on stilts through the crowd and performing their first head-banger strapped to an electric chair.

Throughout their set, R’s BG pushed the prop-rock envelope. There were pizzas sliced up into pentagrams. There were hearses spun in circles through the audience. There was a flaming baby carriage for their cover of “Hell Is for Children” by that “horror queen” (as Mike Odd referred to her), Pat Benatar. There was a flaming guitar, which I failed to get a decent picture of, but I’m posting a picture of it anyway because I love that one of the spectators in the foreground is a giant brain. [Update: We have since received a great shot of the flaming guitar from none other than Mr. Mike Odd himself. Thanks, Mike!]

The show ended with what looked like Manute Bol in a werewolf costume stumbling through the crowd. It was all quite the rock ‘n’ roll spectacle.

Photo by Todd Sharp

Next up: Haunted Garage, the recently rebooted splatter-punk ensemble led by the inimitable Dukey Flyswatter, looking fetching in an apron made of human skin (note the screaming face visible near the hem) and ass-crack-revealing biker shorts. (I failed to get a decent photo of Dukey’s ass-crack. To all humanity, my humblest apologies.) Oh yeah, and those things on his face? Mousetraps. Even the guy with the super-gross zombie makeup was probably like, “Woah, dude. Hardcore.”

“This is our first Halloween show in 20 fuckin’ years!” Dukey proudly announced. They tore through a short but furious set of Haunted Garage classics, from “Welcome to Hell” and “Bitch Like You” to “Incredible Two-Headed Transplant” and “Brain in a Jar” (complete with, yes, a brain in a jar, like something you’d see at the checkout counter of a zombie convenience store). The stage show was stripped down compared to Rosemary’s Billygoat (“We’re building it back up,” Dukey promised), but what they lacked in flaming baby carriages they more than made up for with energy, intensity and spewage. Right after “Welcome to Hell,” Dukey scored a direct hit on me and several other folks in the front row with a well-sprayed mouthful of what looked like blood but which I believe was Jack Daniels, Coke and red food coloring. At least that’s what it tasted like. Yeah, he caught me mouth-breathing, that bastard. What can I say? I was slack-jawed with admiration at their horror-punk onslaught.

The whole band tore it up, but special recognition has to go to guitarist Erik Erath, whose screaming leads took the whole band into Priest/Maiden territory. Not bad for a guy whose brains appeared to be leaking out of his forehead.

Oh, did I mention the giant, demonic rabbit? That’s Peter Rotten Tail, who came out and danced around for a song or two. There was also a flying monkey and some go-go dancers called the Gore Gore Girls. But Dukey was always the center of attention. That guy’s a true rock ‘n’ roll maniac.

After Haunted Garage, we stumbled over to a whole second fenced-off area for the Zombie Walk, which isn’t really a walk anymore—more like an aimless milling about, which I suppose is more zombie-like, come to think of it. Anyway, the headliners in this smaller area were L.A.’s preeminent metal mariachi band, Metalachi. We’ve already described the awesomeness that is a Metalachi show, so I won’t give a full recap here; I’ll just note that I believe they rocked this poor gentleman’s fucking face off:

So thanks for an excellent evening, Long Beach Zombie Walk! And sorry we missed you, Radioactive Chicken Heads. I’m sure you were a huge hit with the undead crowd.

Usually I save my zombie impersonation for the morning after the party. But Saturday, Oct. 26th, I’m gonna be moanin, shamblin and bitin people in the head during the party. It’s the sixth annual Long Beach Zombie Walk Festival, motherfuckers! And this year, they’ve got a music lineup that’s practically ripped from the pages of this here blog.

Splatter punks Haunted Garage have played a few reunion shows in the years since they broke up in 1993, but they’ve mostly been one-off type deals. But this time, if we can believe the band’s Facebook page, they’re cranking things up a notch. Apparently mousetrap-loving frontman Dukey Flyswatter has assembled an all-new lineup and is rehearsing for some fall shows and a four-song EP. Here’s Dukey’s most recent Facebook update, typos and all, posted this past Friday:

Hellz Bellz!!! Haunted Garage 2013 just had it’s first rehearsal and it sounded pretty good. New guys, New engergy. WE need weird guest performers and props and newbies to showcase their make up and other skills. Were almost back to square one with the stage show but it wont’s take long.

You read right, kids: Dukey wants YOU to help him make this back-from-the-dead version of Haunted Garage the greatest and goriest one yet. Sounds like they’re set for musicians, but if you can contribute some crazy visuals, hit the man up.

We’ll keep you posted on Haunted Garage 2013 as more details emerge. In the meantime, here’s a little taste of Dukey’s other band, the Undead Kennedys, a zombie DK tribute band featuring members of our pals the Radioactive Chicken Heads. How did we not know about this sooner? We need to get out more.

Have you ever wondered what the missing link is between the Misfits and GWAR? Us neither, but a reader named Jeremy just found it for us and posted it on our Facebook page (and hey, while we’re on the subject, go over to Facebook and “Like” us, will ya? I know, it’s annoying, but you never know…maybe if you do it, we’ll give you a pony). The band is called Haunted Garage and they appear to have taken the fine art of covering your audience in fake blood and real slime to heights that would probably leave Oderus Urungus clutching his codpiece in a fetal position. Okay, maybe not, but they were pretty fucking gross, is what I’m saying.

Haunted Garage were part of the L.A. underground rock scene from around 1985 until 1992, although they’ve done a handful of reunion shows in the years since. They only released one album as far as we can tell, a lost nugget from 1990 called Possession Park, although they also did the soundtracks for a lot of horror and sci-fi B-movies like Nightmare Sisters and The Dead Hate the Living!

The band was started by a B-movie actor and screenwriter named Michael Sonye. Among the credits on his IMDb page: Dorm of the Dead, Terrors From the Clit, Hollywood Chainsaw Bartenders and of course the immortal Troma classic Surf Nazis Must Die, which I’m pretty sure I watched in a bonghit haze back in high school and even then thought, “Wow, this sucks.” For Haunted Garage, Sonye made up an alter ego named Dukey Flyswatter who’s sort of a combination of Iggy Pop, Glenn Danzig and Dr. Frank N. Furter. The band apparently started out playing cover versions of songs from classic horror film soundtracks, but eventually started coming up with original tunes with titles like “Torture Dungeon” and “Brain in a Jar.” Their sound is usually described as horror punk, although Dukey also used the term “splatter punk,” which is a lot more evocative, don’t ya think?

Haunted Garage shows were highly theatrical and sometimes destructive affairs. A bio on the band’s MySpace page claims that their final show, at a long-gone Hollywood dive called the Coconut Teaszer, ended with the crowd tearing down the sprinkler system and girls getting their tops ripped off. Up onstage, most of the blood, gore and mayhem was faked, but sometimes the band could cross over into full-on freakshow territory. Dukey, for example, is famous for attaching mousetraps to his face. (And if you clicked on that link, I apologize. That’s gonna be a tough image to shake, huh?)

There’s a cool “video profile” of Haunted Garage on YouTube, which also introduces such other memorable band members as their drag queen guitarist, Gaby Godhead, their rat-loving drummer, Stiff Slug, and the “gore-gore girls,” who provided the eye candy. But the video that we felt would give y’all the best taste of Haunted Garage in all their gory glory was the one below, featuring a sort of necrophiliac love song called “Dead and Gone.” Stay with it till around the 2:30 mark, when it really takes a turn for the freaky.